The ultimate goal of this work is the development of a non-subjective clinical tool for diagnosing patients with ME. Lombardi et. al.
Last month Health Rising looked at a potential ion channel biomarker coming out of the NCNED in Australia. This month brings yet another potential biomarker hailing from the Nevada Center for Biomedical Research (formerly WPI) at the University of Reno. Time will tell if either turns out. In the meantime it’s good to see ME/CFS research centers using innovative techniques to look at this disease in entirely new ways.

Immunosignatures use antibody activity to get an idea of what the immune system is reacting to. The idea is that B-cells are involved in some way in most immune responses. Finding which peptides or antigens the antibodies in a person’s blood bind to could tell us what the immune system is reacting to. If ME/CFS is, at least in part, an immune disease, immunosignature research could tell us much. This approach has been used to provide diagnostic biomarkers for cancer, Valley fever, Alzheimer’s disease and others.

Talk about casting a large net. First antibodies are incubated with or exposed to thousands or in the case of this study over 100,000 randomly generated peptides (short-chains of amino acids). Because so many different peptides are used, the immunosignatures produced by this technique can be highly sensitive (i.e. highly accurate in identifying patients). They’re far more sensitive than say an ELISA blood test that might sum the contributions of several antibodies.
The technology used to produce immunosignatures is also very robust; a single drop of blood blotted on some paper and sent through the mail can suffice. It’s also potentially much more stable than the cytokine studies that have, at times, been so variable in ME/CFS. Because antibodies are much more stable than cytokines (they last longer in the body), they might yield better results. Read More